Autodesk 123D Creature Featured Lulu!!!!

Today I am thrilled to bring you some exciting news about what happened awhile ago with a project of mine using Autodesk’s 123D Creature app! It’s a bit late because I was working on other projects. This app has a great community section which allows people to upload their work to the gallery where they can be commented on. I decided to upload a model of Lulu and see what happens. After a couple of days I got great feedback on Lulu! What I also didn’t expect to see was when it showed up in the “Featured” gallery! Unlike the regular gallery, this one is where the app developers pick a model they see deserves to be spotlighted. I felt very honored to have been chosen and to also be around some of my favorite artists in the same gallery! I was also front paged on the app’s website as well(just so you’re not confused, the top portion of the image is just a slide show of images, so I’m not in the 123D MeshMixer gallery)! I totally did not expect that at all!

I’m on the front page!!!!

My Lulu model was so much fun to make! She was inspired off of my pet chihuahua named, Lulu. That dog is such a goofball! She’s well tempered and very cute! Since she’s kinda chubby, I over exaggerated her weight and her face. Lulu literally is a living, breathing character which is why love her! I’ve done drawings of her before, so I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do. Below are some examples(be sure to click to enlarge):

Lulu Pumpkin

Lulu Character Design

Na-na-na-na-na BATDOG!

After looking at my drawings, I experimented with the app to see how far I wanted to exaggerate her. The pictures below are in order of the stages I went through in the early process. You’ll notice a drastic leap in shape and design. The reason being that the one with the cartoony eyes was sculpted from a sphere. I chose a sphere because in ZBrush (a 3D clay sculpting tool) it’s a common shape artists begin with. I also wanted to challenge myself. After several minutes, I soon began to realize the problems and limitations of the app when I took this route. The overall shape wasn’t working out for me. So I went back to the drawing board and started from scratch. This time, I used the default skeleton (it has arms and legs) and added extensions off from the base structure so that it made sculpting much easier later on. If you want to see how working with a “skeleton” works, check out my past blog where I give a tour.

Front early Lulu

Back early Lulu

Short ears test

Clay Sculpt

Clay Sculpt

Over time I began to solidify my ideas and Lulu was finally taking shape. After sculpting, I then went to search for a good fur texture. Once I found one, I painted the fur onto the model to get a visual idea of how well or not it would wrap around my model. So it’s not finalized here yet.

Texture Experiment

Once I was happy with how the fur worked out, I then painted a color over top of the fur to lighten it for her off white areas, and at the same still kept the texture. To do this, I tuned down the opacity of my brush lower than half way. I did a combination of re-painting the texture and re-coloring the model until I got the effect I wanted. I did the same thing for her black spot areas, but instead of lightening those areas, they were darkened over with black.

For her eyes and nose I used an image to paint over for those areas. The nose however, I took the liberty of refining the lights and darks so that it was more believable. The ears I custom painted without any textures and her paws I painted myself too.